Why Your Videos Belong in SharePoint

Do you find yourself watching more video at work these days? If not, you will soon. And integrating that video into your content management system (CMS) will be essential to helping your audience use it productively.

The ins and outs of enterprise videos were examined yesterday in a CMSWire webinar entitled: "Making Video Communication Easier with SharePoint." The session, which was sponsored by RAMP, can be watched here or at the end of this story.

RAMP Product Manager Brian Prigge, the company's SharePoint architect, explained the rapid rise of video in the enterprise, and in particular, its transition from a big production effort by the marketing department to an off-the-cuff effort by ordinary employees.

"As we're watch video evolve in the enterprise, one of the main things we're seeing is the consumerization of video," he said. "No longer is marketing making a 20-minute, highly produced piece of content. We're seeing 30-60 second pieces of content being produced on the front lines."

He offered four numbers that reflect the big need to get video content into your CMS.

7

"According to Gartner, by the end of 2017, seven in 10 videos in the Enterprise will be less than 60 seconds long," he said. He noted sites like Vine already limit videos to just six seconds and predicted that consumers will grow used to shorter clips. That, in turn, will send ripples across the enterprise.

"While that [length] is not necessarily what we're going to be seeing in the enterprise, it does set certain expectations within your user base," Prigge said. "So make sure the content you're providing fits into that snackable, watch-what-I-need-and-move-on concept."

16

The second number was 16, which Gartner said is equal to the number of hours of video workers in large companies are expected to watch monthly by the end of 2016.

"When you combine that with seven out of 10 of those videos being less than 60 second long, really what you're looking at is a high volume of content in terms of the number of assets that need to be managed," Prigge said. "And that management can become very cumbersome when not integrated into your native CMS system."

Instead of just one or two video assets, companies may have hundreds, even thousands, of videos produced over a few months, presenting a challenge to keep track of all that content.

25

By the end of 2018, Prigge said 25 percent of large companies expect to have a specific strategy to make corporate computing environments more like consumer environments. Consider, for example, consumer sites like Facebook and Twitter, and how they compare to enterprise social networks like Yammer, Jive and Chatter.

"Those tools are going to become much more integrated from a UI perspective than they are today," Prigge said. "And your users are going to start expecting things of that nature from their corporate platforms just as they have them today from their consumers platforms."

75

The fourth number was 75 -- which is the percentage of workers at large companies who are expected to interact with various videos more that three times a day.

"When your users are dealing with video, we don't want them to have to jump out to some third-party platform, to jump out of the CMS they're already in for, perhaps, customer management or process management," Prigge said.

"If they can watch it all in the same place, all in the same time," he said, "that's where you're going to see the most bang for your buck, both from a user perspective but also from a technology perspective."

The Video Lifecycle

As you prepare to put all that video content into your CMS, Prigge also advised considering the four parts of the video lifecycle -- creation, management, discovery and engagement.

Creation: Video is, of course, already being created in enterprise in the form of corporate communications, training sessions, video conferences and employee-generated content. "One of the biggest things we're seeing from a video creation perspective is the ability for the very senior field employees to create a two-minute video on, perhaps, how to fix a fuel pump," Prigge said.

Management: It's important to consider such things as storage, delivery, cross-device compatibility, cross-browser compatibility and transcoding, which is the conversion from one video format to another. "The ability to have that happen all seamlessly in one system is very, very important," said Prigge.

Discovery: With thousands and, eventually, hundreds of thousands of video assets, it will be important to make it easy to find a particular moment in a particular video. This, noted Prigge, goes far beyond the use of titles and tags. RAMP, for example, creates transcripts within minutes of filing a video with key terms highlighted and linked. "The user can generate the tags themselves, or the system can tag it for them," he said.

Engagement: "This is where we get into the need for very intentional steps taken to engage your users," said Prigge. "The No. 1 thing for engaging your users on a day by day basis is to have constantly refreshing content." Imagine what Twitter, Facebook and YouTube would be like if you saw the same content each time you visited the sites.

SMG/CMSWire is a leading, native digital publication produced by Simpler Media Group, Inc. We provide articles, research and events for sophisticated professionals driving digital customer experience strategy, evolving the digital workplace and creating intelligent information management practices. The CMSWire team produces 400+ authoritative articles per quarter for our 2.7 million community members. Join us as a subscriber.